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Drug Raids: Las Vegas Narc Serving Marijuana Search Warrant Kills Father-to-Be In His Own Bathroom A 21-year-old father-to-be was killed last Friday night by a Las Vegas Police Department narcotics officer serving a search warrant for marijuana. Trevon Cole was shot once in the bathroom of his apartment after he made what police described as "a furtive movement." Police have said Cole was not armed. Police said Monday they recovered an unspecified amount of marijuana and a set of digital scales. A person identifying herself as Cole's fiancée, Sequoia Pearce, in the comments section in the article linked to above said no drugs were found. Pearce, who is nine months pregnant, shared the apartment with Cole and was present during the raid. "I was coming out, and they told me to get on the floor. I heard a gunshot and was trying to see what was happening and where they had shot him," Pearce told KTNV-TV. According to police, they arrived at about 9 p.m. Friday evening at the Mirabella Apartments on East Bonanza Road, and detectives knocked and announced their presence. Receiving no response, detectives knocked the door down and entered the apartment. They found Pearce hiding in a bedroom closet and took her into custody. They then tried to enter a bathroom where Cole was hiding. He made "a furtive movement" toward a detective, who fired a single shot, killing Cole. "It was during the course of a warrant and as you all know, narcotics warrants are all high-risk warrants," Capt. Patrick Neville of Metro's Robbery-Homicide Bureau said Friday night. But a person identifying himself as Pearce's brother, who said he had spoken with his sister, had a different version of events: "The police bust in the door, with guns drawn to my little sister and her now deceased boyfriend," he wrote. "My sister is 8 ½ months pregnant, two weeks until the due date. But they bust in the door, irritated they didn't find any weapons or drugs, drag this young man into the restroom to interrogate him and two minutes later my sister hears a shot. They shot him with a shotgun, no weapon. For what? My sister is a baby, this young man is a baby, now my sister is at his house telling his mom her son is dead, and he is barely 21." Pearce herself told the Las Vegas Review-Journal Monday that police forced her to kneel at gunpoint in the bedroom and that she could see Cole in the bathroom from the reflection of a mirror. According to Cole, police ordered Cole to get on the ground, he raised his hands and said "Alright, alright," and a shot rang out. According to Pearce and family members, Cole had no criminal record, had achieved an Associate of Arts degree, and was working as an insurance adjustor while working on a political science degree at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He was not a drug dealer, Pearce said. "Trevon was a recreational smoker. He smoked weed, marijuana. That’s what he did," she told KTNV-TV. "They didn't have to kill him. We were supposed to get married next year, plan a black and white affair,” she said. "He was all I ever knew, we were gonna make it." LVPD Monday identified the police shooter as narcotics detective Bryan Yant, a 10-year veteran of the force. This is the third time Yant has controversially used his police firearm. In 2002, he shot and killed a robbery suspect, claiming the suspect, who was on the ground, aimed a weapon at him. But although the suspect's gun was found 35 feet away, a jury took only half an hour to find the shooting justified. The following year, he shot and wounded a man armed with a knife and a baseball ball who had been hired to kill a dog that had killed another neighborhood dog. Yants claimed the man attacked him and that he mistook the bat for a shotgun, but the man said he was running away from Yants when Yants fired repeatedly, striking him once in the hip. Because there was no death in that case, no inquest was held, but the department's use of force board exonerated Yants. Yants is on paid administrative leave while the department investigates. The family has hired an attorney to pursue a civil action. And another American has apparently been killed for no good reason in the name of the war on drugs. "Narcotics warrants are high risk warrants," said Capt. Neville. The question is for whom, and the answer is obvious: The people on the receiving end of them. The police? Not so much, as we have shown in our annual surveys of police casualties in the drug war.

This new DPA video featuring Sting was more than enough to drive Bill O'Reilly over the edge yet again:


As usual, every single "fact" presented here by O'Reilly is completely made up, as demonstrated in this fact-check from Jacob Sullum. But if Bill O'Reilly wants to spend his time on TV lying and complaining about drug policy reform in front of millions of people, I'm totally ok with it. Every stupid word he says about the drug war serves only to further legitimize the debate. People like O'Reilly are the reason we're winning, so the last thing we want from them is silence.

Another sign that the Mexican drug war isn't going very well:

Drug hitmen have forced a string of candidates out of municipal races in two states on the U.S. border and killed at least one mayoral hopeful, using terror to try to dictate who will run cities and towns along key smuggling routes into the United States.

The violence is an alarming sign of the power drug traffickers still wield, despite an all-out war with security forces and President Felipe Calderon's vow to weaken the cartels. [Reuters]

Well, if the cartels are out there killing politicians who won't cooperate, what does that say about the public officials who haven't been targeted? Hint: they might not be very trustworthy.

No one knows for sure how many Mexican politicians have been bought out by the cartels, but it's something to think about before handing over millions of American tax dollars to the Mexican government to fund their war on drugs. It's bad enough that we're funding endless bloodshed and disorder, but if that money is just going into the pockets of the drug lords and their corrupt political operatives, well, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.